Wondering if your typical/average/normie person (millennials and younger) know it or know about it. It’s enabled on reddit and discord?

  • SpicyTaint@lemmy.world
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    8 天前

    I think less than 50% of people with access to technology are tech literate enough to know what markdown is. I don’t think age really applies here so much as interest in technology.

    Just because I drive a car doesn’t mean I know or care about how it works. It’s just a tool.

  • AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world
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    8 天前

    Most people are probably at least aware that there are contexts where their basic plain-text formatting (like asterisks for bullets) will get cleaned up to a prettier format when they post it.

    They may not know the name of the format or all the available features.

  • Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world
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    8 天前

    Elder Millennial here. All I know about markdown is:

    1. To make a hard copy of a thought or conversation. “Mark that down in your notes, so we don’t forget.”

    2. A discount or sale. “Did you see the 30% markdown on three legged jeans?”

    • Rikudou_Sage@lemmings.world
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      8 天前

      And yet you just used it! Some parts of markdown were made to be intuitive and natural like:

      1. Numbering your items
      2. will automatically format them
      3. into ordered lists
      • and if you use - it’s an unordered list
      • same with asterisk
        • Pamasich@kbin.earth
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          7 天前

          Markdown is a markup language, which can be used by users to indicate formatting hints to the underlying system. For example, you want a text to be bold, a markup language lets you tell that to the website in a way it understands.

          Older markup languages tended to be verbose and complicated. For example, this is a numbered list in BBCode, which is the classic forum markup language: [ol][li]Item one[/li][li]Item two[/li][/ol].

          Markdown keeps it simple and intuitive, for the most part.

          1. item 1
          2. item 2
          

          The above is a numbered list in Markdown. Much simpler than the BBCode version. Simple enough that people like you can do it without even being aware of Markdown at all.


          *This is cursive text*
          **This is bold text**
          
          # this is a heading
          
          ## this is a smaller heading
          
          ###### usually up to six levels are supported, but this might differ based on the implementation (my instance seems to make all of these the same size)
          
          > this is a quote
          it can span multiple lines too
          
          this is a bullet point list:
          - item 1
          - item 2
          
          [Links are more complicated, but still as easy as they can be](https://example.org/)
          

          The above doesn’t actually display formatted because I used a code block to show the Markdown as written. The below is how the above actually displays:

          This is cursive text This is bold text

          this is a heading

          this is a smaller heading

          usually up to six levels are supported, but this might differ based on the implementation (my instance seems to make all of these the same size)

          this is a quote it can span multiple lines too

          this is a bullet point list:

          • item 1
          • item 2

          Links are more complicated, but still as easy as they can be


          edit: this is what the original creator of Markdown has to say on the matter:

          Markdown is intended to be as easy-to-read and easy-to-write as is feasible.

          Readability, however, is emphasized above all else. A Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. While Markdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML filters — including Setext, atx, Textile, reStructuredText, Grutatext, and EtText — the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email.

          To this end, Markdown’s syntax is comprised entirely of punctuation characters, which punctuation characters have been carefully chosen so as to look like what they mean. E.g., asterisks around a word actually look like emphasis. Markdown lists look like, well, lists. Even blockquotes look like quoted passages of text, assuming you’ve ever used email.

        • Notyou@sopuli.xyz
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          8 天前

          I am, also, an elder millennial and confused. Maybe it’s just some form of problem solving/way to sort your thoughts or options?

      • Secret Music@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        8 天前

        Some parts of markdown were made to be intuitive and natural like

        And then other parts of it are just infuriating. Like how if you try to post song lyrics or something, the markdown just mashes every sentence together in one line for some reason. So you have to know the secret code just to make gdamn new lines. I actually pressed enter to go to a new line 5 times in this paragraph but it comes out all jumbled together after posting.

        As far as I’m concerned, I shouldn’t need to know some special formatting just for return to work properly.

        • aasatru@kbin.earth
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          8 天前

          And then you’re on your phone, and typing two spaces at the end of each line is a mess because your keyboard insists you really want punctuation and a space. Because why would you end a sentence with two spaces. Gah.

    • riot@lemmy.world
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      7 天前

      Any Elder Millennial born after 1979 can’t Markdown, all they know is jot that down, 30% off on jeans, nostalgia for blockbuster, eat hot chip and buy avocado toast

  • irelephant [he/him]🍭@lemm.ee
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    7 天前

    No, they use the WYSIWYG editor it has.

    I am a big fan of markdown though.
    Did you know you can nest these?
    That's right, someone could make a choose your own adventure game this way
  • Allero@lemmy.today
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    8 天前

    Not Markdown as a whole, but I guess they commonly know to use asterisks for italics and bold. Some also know how to cross the text. Not much more for a normie, though.

    • Hemingways_Shotgun@lemmy.ca
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      7 天前

      I guess they commonly know to use asterisks for italics and bold

      I wouldn’t guess that at all. Pretty much everyone I know in the “normie” world would AT BEST use ctrl-i and ctrl-b if they’re not just pressing the icon in the gui.

      Hell, most of them look at me like I’m a goddamn morlock when I tell them to Shift-delete in order to skip the recycling bin.

      • ChexMax@lemmy.world
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        7 天前

        Yeah, I’m a normie, I’m tech literate adjacent-adjacent, by which I mean I’m here on lemmy rather than Facebook, but no. Me and my peers are not pressing ctrl anything. I don’t even know what gui means. Something user interface? I’m not proud to be this dumb, but I’m pretty sure most “regular” people are in this boat with me. I was the third most tech literate person in my entire office last year with a bunch of millennials simply because I was willing to Google things.

        • Hemingways_Shotgun@lemmy.ca
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          7 天前

          Most IT nowadays is just simply the ability to google. What sets a professional IT person apart from an amateur is that the professional has an educated guess as to what to google in the first place.

          Non-professional: “My computer is making a weird buzzing noise”

          Professional: “What are the symptoms of a bad cooling fan?”

        • ulterno@programming.dev
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          7 天前

          OIC. I should have thought about that.
          And here I was considering making this the default way of doing a strikethrough.

          On the other hand, perhaps we should update the screen readers to make that work. Maybe it can be added as a category of stuff that is to be explained separately.

          The least I can do is install a screen reader and know what it does with this.

          Google Translate’s “Listen” option seems to work well with it though.

  • Jose A Lerma@lemmy.world
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    7 天前

    The issue for a long time was that there is no markdown standard, so everyone had their own version of it.

    CommonMark is gaining ground, so hopefully markdown will be the same everywhere soon